Swarms, floods and marauders: the toxic metaphors of the migration debate
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Version 0 of 1. Does language change the way you think? It’s a question that has occupied the finest academic minds for decades. There’s even a name for it: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after anthropologist Edward Sapir and fire-insurance official Benjamin Lee Whorf. The latter, a linguist in his spare time, believed that Native Americans thought in a completely different way to Europeans because of the way their grammar worked. Most experts now agree that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong: the language you use does not determine the ideas in your head. However, studies have shown that it can influence them in important ways, setting up subtle habits of which you are probably unaware. All very interesting, a sort of linguistic curio. Except that the ability to influence thought matters a great deal. George Orwell recognised this, inventing Newspeak to illustrate how, in one nightmare scenario, language could be used as an instrument of control. We’re not there yet, but if we want to maintain the ability to think clearly and independently about migration, there’s good reason to be wary of some of the vocabulary now being bandied about. Related: David Cameron used ‘swarm’ instead of ‘plague’ in case it implied that God had sent the migrants | Frankie Boyle David Cameron recently spoke of a “swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean”. His foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, labelled migrants “marauding” and one recent headline in the Daily Mail fretted that “this tidal wave of migrants could be the biggest threat to Europe since the war”. The Daily Express frequently talks of the migrant “flood” – even the BBC used “flood” and “stream” as verbs to describe the movement of people north out of Italy. In their landmark work Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson picked up the baton set down by Sapir and Whorf and ran off in a new direction. They showed just how deeply embedded figures of speech are in our language. We barely even notice them, and yet they represent fixed ideas that are ultimately just one way of looking at the world. Lakoff and Johnson wrote out the most pervasive metaphors like this: GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN (“We hit a peak last year, but it’s been downhill ever since”) ARGUMENT IS WAR (“Your claims are indefensible”) IDEAS ARE FOOD (“We shouldn’t spoonfeed our students”) UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (“Let me point something out to you. That way things will become clear”). The capital letters help to dis-embed them, to bring them into consciousness. Would you have said the sentence “I’m feeling low” contained a metaphor? Probably not. So what are the ones we’ve picked to represent the movement of people to and around Europe? MIGRANTS ARE INSECTS is the metaphor favoured by Cameron. It’s a subset of MIGRANTS ARE ANIMALS, the basis of Gillian Duffy’s famous “flocking” comment. Hammond employs MIGRANTS ARE AN INVADING ARMY, the BBC and the Express, MIGRATION IS INUNDATION. When set out so starkly it’s clear that these metaphors are way over the top. Not to mention dehumanising, ridiculously simplistic, pitched at around the intellectual level of a dark-ages Anglo Saxon cowering in a thatched hut. It shouldn’t need pointing out, but: a plague of insects destroys crops and spoils food. Invading armies burn down towns and commit acts of genocide. Floods wreck property and drown people. Migrants don’t do any of these things. We barely even notice figures of speech, yet they represent fixed ideas that are just one way of looking at the world And if you’re still worried that Britain really is at risk of being “overwhelmed” (another inundation metaphor), let’s look at one category of migrant: the asylum seeker. The number of first-time asylum claims lodged with the British authorities between January and March 2015 was 7,335, lower than in Austria, Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary and Germany. That figure represents only 4% of asylum claims across the EU and puts us 17th in the league table of claims per million inhabitants. If we look further afield, we see countries in the Middle East absorbing far higher numbers of refugees: there are 1.8 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 1.1 million in Lebanon and 629,000 in Jordan. This is not about some attempt to limit free speech or “ban” certain words. It’s about challenging subtle patterns of thinking that do not reflect reality. As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective. Even setting aside the question of compassion and decency, there can be no place for MIGRANTS ARE INSECTS or MIGRATION IS INUNDATION in any discussion that claims to have the best interests of the British people at heart. |